NEW YORK ? With the long string of mobile devices and platforms available to marketers, advertisers need to develop campaigns that combine multiple platforms, per an exec from The Weather Channel at the 4th annual Mobile Marketing Day 2012 conference.

?The Weather Channel: How the Media Brand is Crafting Mobile Advertising Campaigns for Advertisers? session gave attendees an overlook of how mobile is playing a large role for the publisher. The session also revealed a couple upcoming mobile efforts from The Weather Channel.

?Weather has become a must-have application for users on their mobile devices,? said Pat McCormack, vice president of sales and strategy at The Weather Channel, Atlanta.

?If you do not have a plan for how to market your brand using mobile, find one quickly because the traffic is moving there,? he said.

Mobile need
According to Mr. McCormack, The Weather Channel has learned three major lessons with mobile over the past few years.

First, there is a mobile revolution taking place with both consumers and brands. There is also an increased number of users accessing content from multiple mobile screens. Additionally, the mobile audience is fragmented.

For The Weather Channel, mobile Web usage outpaced traffic to the publisher?s Web site this past summer. This shows how weather is one of the topics consumers most heavily rely on via their handsets.

The publisher claims that the mobile Web site generates 32 million unique visitors per month and reaches 28 percent of the active mobile audience.

According to data from eMarketer, there were 90.1 million smartphones in the United States in 2011 and there are expected to be 148.6 million smartphones in the U.S. by 2015.

Research has also shown that adults aged 18-54 years old view six to seven different screens a day, showing the opportunities that marketers have to reach consumers across multiple platforms.

According to Mr. McCormack, advertisers who use three or more platforms for their campaigns see that the ads are 21 times more effective.

Location can also play a large role in how marketers develop campaigns.

For example, a campaign with Wendy?s frosty products only served to places where the temperature was more than 70 degrees out. By targeting a user with a contextually relevant offer, marketers can tailor campaigns that users will be more enticed to interact with.

Weather also allows users to play with product placement. For marketing purposes, The Weather Channel advertisers can place their product inside a season-appropriate scene.

The Weather Channel is in the middle of developing a new service called hyperlocal audience targeting that will leverage public, third-party data that marketers can use to make campaigns more tailored that will include more details on a demographic.

App nation
When looking at its overall strategy, Mr. McCormack said that The Weather Channel is primarily app-focused.

In May, The Weather Channel plans to update its iPhone app to take advantage of the device?s higher-resolution screen.

The revamped iPhone app will include more personalized features. For example, users can choose a picture for the background and the app will also include an image that looks like a piece of glass with a customized weather feed.

The Weather Channel is also beginning to incorporate more original content into its programming after seeing how personal weather is to users.

The publisher recently used an app as a second-screen experience for its From the Edge with Peter Lik program. The app uses sound recognition to recognize where in the program a viewer was to serve relevant, additional content.

With Apple?s recent announcement that 25 billion apps have been downloaded, it can be difficult for marketers to know where to put their money.

The Weather Channel claims that its app, which are available for iPhone, Android, BlackBerry, Windows Phone 7, iPad and Kindle Fire devices have been downloaded more than 56 million times.

Mr. McCormack said that The Weather Channel?s iPad app is the No. 1 weather app for the device.

The publisher was one of the first companies with an app for the Kindle Fire that came preloaded on the devices at launch. The Kindle Fire app has been downloaded more than 2.5 million times and is seeing more than one million impressions per day.

Although iPads are still dominant, the tablet market is heating up.

?The tablet story until recently ended with the iPad, but is now seeing more activity with Android as a viable content platform,? Mr. McCormack said.

?Mobile has finally arrived and is a huge opportunity as a marketing platform,? he said.

Final Take
Pat McCormack is vice president of sales and strategy at The Weather Channel, Atlanta